Doors Open

During Doors Open Milwaukee I went to the Basilica of St. Josephat, the Broadway Theatre, and Blue Dress Park. Broadway Theatre was my first stop, as it’s located right next to MIAD and I had always wondered about the innards of the building, passing it so many times and glancing in the windows on my way to the parking lot every day. When I finally went in I was surprised by the height of the dome in the opera style theatre and the tromp l’oeil effect of the ceiling painting. The Basilica of St. Josephat operated in a similar way, although in a much grander scale. The mathematical sublimity of the space was baffling, and I walked in at just the right time to sit down in a pew and get regaled with the full history of the building. The one thing that stuck out to me about the speech was that most of the “marble” in the building was actually just stone painted to look like marble, as it was cheaper at the time of its fabrication to fake it and not buy the real thing. 

Then there was Blue Dress Park, a site that I had heard about from Paul Druecke but admittedly never actually visited until this day. The contrast was staggering to say the least. Here I found myself in a (ostensibly) totally useless space that had been reclaimed by an artist, after having visited grandiose places that were built specifically for a purpose that is culturally important. Yet, I was equally enchanted with the pseudo park as I had been with the huge domes of the buildings I had just been in. After being interviewed by Sara Daleiden about how I felt about the space, I felt strangely attracted to it. Although the human effort and aesthetics of both of my previously visited buildings were compelling, I felt that I could easily spend more of my time in this strange patch of concrete than in those large constructions. Something about the reclamation of a forgotten space was more romantic than the construction of a planned and executed space built for a specific function.